What Do You Think About The Claim That Everybody Is Already Enlightened

[Joseph Maynor]

Chime I'm in on this please   I'm starting to see thIs but I want to hear your point of view.  It's kinda paradoxical.   Firstly, I realize now that no person can be enlightened.  This is a paradox too.  But I don't want to pollute the waters too much with my own monkey-mind.   Let yours do the talking now.  My monkey is on a strict diet.

Edited June 30, 2017 by Joseph Maynor

[John Iverson]

Meditation is enough , silence will talk to you.. just take time...  enlightenment is just simple but it is hard to stay in place and to become one in nature is alot of work to do... you will meet certain point that is is very painful... HAHA.. SO good luck!! You can give up anytime.. it is easy to follow the crowd than to pursue enlightenment and be one of the nature! HAHA SO yeaa! Namaste ? 

[Prabhaker]

10 minutes ago, Joseph Maynor said:

Everybody Is Already Enlightened

YOU ARE already enlightened. You need not be enlightened. You have simply forgotten; it is a kind of forgetfulness. Not that you have to become -- you ARE that. Just a recognition, just a turning in, just a deep look inside yourself... and you will start laughing. You have always been there! You had never left i n the first place. Enlightenment is your nature.

Enlightenment is a joke because it is not something that you have to achieve, yet you have to make all possible efforts to achieve it. It is already the case: you are born enlightened.

The word "enlightenment" is beautiful. We come from the source, the ultimate source of light. We are small rays of that sun, and howsoever far away we may have gone, our nature remains the same. Nobody can go against his real nature: you can forget about it, but you cannot lose it. Hence attaining it is not the right expression; it is not attained, it is only remembered. That's why Buddha called his method SAMMASATI.

Sammasati means right remembrance of that which is already there. Nanak, Kabir, Raidas, they have all called it SURATI. Surati means remembering the forgotten, but not the lost. Whether you remember or not, it is there -- it is there exactly the same. You can keep your eyes closed to it -- it is there. You can open your eyes -- it is there. You can keep it behind your back -- it is there. You can take a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn and see it -- it is there. It is the same.

George Gurdjieff used to call his method self-remembering. Nothing has to be achieved, nothing at all, but only to be discovered. And the discovery is needed because we go on gathering dust on our mirrors. The mirror is there covered by the dust. Remove the dust, and the mirror starts reflecting the stars, the beyond. Krishnamurti calls it awareness, alertness, attentiveness. These are different expressions for the same phenomenon. They are to remind you that you are not to go anywhere, not to be somebody else. You just have to find out who you are, and the finding is not difficult because it is your nature -- just a little reshuffling inside, a little cleaning.

Osho- Come, Come, Yet Again Come, Chapter #14

[Telepresent]

One of the reasons I like Jed McKenna's writing is that he says that, so far as he is concerned, enlightenment means Truth (and he suggests that the impression many people have when they say 'enlightenment' is, in fact, not Truth).  So, if we come from the assumption that enlightenment = Truth, then we must always be in & of Truth, because Truth cannot cease - cannot ever not be.  That's one of the things about the absolute Truth - it's absolute by definition.

Which, of course, isn't quite the same thing as saying "you're already enlightened".  If enlightenment is awareness of Truth, then no, I don't think we are already enlightened.  If enlightenment is simply being True, then we must be, even unknowingly

[Nahm]

@Joseph Maynor its not paradoxical.  think of it as if everyone is enlightened, they just don't have time to realize it because they're keeping busy typing instead of doing practices / meditation.  

Edited June 30, 2017 by Nahm

[Ananta]

You already are what you are seeking. Its you. If you can "realize" it, then it was there all along. So, what's the issue then?

The issue is Self ignorance. We were spoken to as babies/toddlers as though we were objects, given a name-called that name over and over, told your good/your bad, do this/do that, then we started to "believe" we were that object.

This (body) must be "me", these thoughts must be "mine", so on and so forth. When the "I-thought" first arose it said "I AM", then over time it learned, I AM this and I AM that. The "identification" became more and more solidified. So much so that we can not see beyond.

When you start inquiring into this fallacy and questioning it endlessly. One day the truth is revealed and it was there all along.

 

 

[Bob84]

@Joseph Maynor its like: all christians are already atheists